My Week – Big Fish

You have to admit, my dear reader, as small practice owners, we are big fish in a small pond. I do not know about you, but I so love being a big fish in my little world. This is because the amount of control I have over the way and how much I work.

Think about it, I can steer the direction of my small world, I can be choosy whom to work with, and I can also choose the hours I work. After such flexibility, would you want to be a small fish in a big pond? In my case, the lack of control would drive me nuts now that I know of a better alternative. Up yours, big pond corporate world! You are not good enough for me.

As a big fish of my small practice, please allow me the luxury of FT Ltd’s CEO’s statement based on accounts for the year ended 31st March 2016.

The results are nothing short of impressive. It was our best year in the history of our practice. The substantial increase in turnover by 64% was backed up by increased healthy profits. Despite such success, we are not complacent. We have real challenges ahead. We are getting ourselves ready to face these challenges head-on.

As a CEO, I would like to highlight some tough challenges that the practice faced and still managed to achieve impressive results. These problems included:

Key personnel leaving

Moving to software that was inefficient, costly and took up an enormous amount of resources in the setting up phase

Price competition with an increasing number of small practice accountants entering the market with lower overheads. They do not have employees, an office or a shop front

We were not able to maintain our page one Local Google ranking because we could not match the marketing budget of more traditional and bigger practices going for the same market share

We faced stiff competition from a two franchisees with a full franchisor back up.

I know the competitive market will get worse and NOT better. We are preparing ourselves for the fight. We will be successful. Our strengths lie in accepting there is no such thing as USP anymore and not listening to doom and gloom scenarios. Further, always challenging the accepted norms in the world of accountant practices.

I firmly believe, effective marketing, putting clients at the centre of all business processes and providing an exceptional service is the way. We simply do NOT and never will, listen to so-called practice gurus or training support advisors. We know our business and what we need to do.

I am far from perfect CEO. At the same, I am the best fit as the chief executive officer of FT Practice Ltd.